Technology Expense Management: How to reduce IT spend

“According to an AOTMP® Research market sizing study, 436,000 organizations will spend $4 trillion globally on telecom, IT, and mobility assets, services, and licenses in 2020.” 

Gartner defines cost optimization as “a business-focused, continuous discipline to drive spending and cost reduction, while maximizing business value”.

Effectively optimizing costs is a multi-step process. 

So, where should you start? 

1 – Unify Your Mobile Environment 

Gain visibility of your entire mobile environment so you can accurately understand your current spend. Mobility is a constantly changing landscape, and keeping track of your devices, data usage, and reporting across carriers can quickly become a nightmare. 

A great way of centralizing the view of your mobility management is through TEM services (Telecom Expense Management). Role-based dashboards will provide a holistic snapshot of your entire mobile environment, regardless of carrier.  

Identifying what you have, how much it costs and who uses it is the first step to optimizing your IT costs. 

2 – Evaluate Spend and Usage

IT Budget: Mobility is often a variable line item for IT budgets, meaning it can be a huge challenge to optimize. Depending on your business needs, you should decide which IT assets and solutions are necessary and which aren’t. 

Future Roadmap: Ask yourself a few crucial questions.  

• Do you have the expertise and tools to optimize your mobility spend and usage?  
• What metrics and KPIs will you follow? 
• What results do you expect from mobile expense optimization? 
• How does your strategy include the ongoing support of your end users? The average troubleshooting ticket can take upwards of 40 minutes to complete.

If you can’t answer these questions with your internal resources, what solutions are available to support you? 

3 – Provider Fulfillment

brightfin fulfills all MACD requests and orders with providers after changes are approved by the customer. For example New lines, device upgrades, plan/feature changes, roaming management etc.

Hardware Deployment

brightfin’s IT asset management best practices can help with your logistic options for mobile hardware. Device logistics include inventory management, staging and kitting, preconfiguration, device replacement and custom configurations.

Cost Optimization

brightfin performs a monthly audit and review of unused plans/features, unused lines, pool utilization, plan/feature portfolio compliance, review expense for inactive users, notifications and alerting of top users and high usage.

4 – Develop a Mobility Practice 

A robust mobility practice will help you optimize business processes and IT costs in the long run. Cost visibility, reporting, automated procurement, inventory management, dashboards, data notification thresholds, and contract negotiation with providers, all work together to optimize the hard and soft costs of mobility management.